


'second star to the right, and straight on till morning.'

by abaddon (nothingbutfic)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-27
Updated: 2017-10-27
Packaged: 2019-01-23 23:32:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12519108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nothingbutfic/pseuds/abaddon
Summary: You were always on my mind. (History is written by the victors.)





	1. Part One

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for a Pornish Pixies LJ Challenge in May 2005, it got way too fucking big and was subsequently posted on LJ.
> 
> Many thanks to florahart, Kevin, and nopejr for providing criticism and beta work on the first three drafts of this, and marksykins for stepping in last minute when I absolutely was despairing over and hating the fic and helping with a few key issues. It's a far, far better fic as a result of those four people.
> 
> The challenge was: contrariwise requested "Neville/Draco. Draco's a pushy, snotty, talkative bottom and Neville's confused. Eventually-taking-charge!Neville melts my socks." This is the result.

Neville walks the corridors with the heavy footfalls of a corpse, his eyes dull, expression blank. If Snape were to come across him and give him detention, Neville would not cower or question or evade; he would merely raise his face to the sight of that spiteful, horrid man and even Snape would be struck by the emptiness he saw there. Everywhere Neville goes, he sees the same dullness, the same lack of life. His housemates attempt to engage him in conversation, jokes, play, but each of their attempts has merely grated against a place in Neville that cannot, will not, be reached, and he knows it as well as they.  
  
At the beginning of the school year, Harry attempted to say a few words, to reassure him that things would be better. Neville just looked at him and saw a young man weighed down by his own grief, and made his own attempt to smile. He didn’t think it was much good, but Harry acknowledged it and moved on, head unbowed and eyes dry. Neither of them has anything left for tears. Luna tried, and tried, and tried, bombarding him by turns with awkward silences and henpecked questions, until she burst into sobs that seemed both sad and comforting, wrapping slender arms around his tubby frame, and kissed him on the cheek.  
  
That private moment seemed to mark a turning point in the sixth year of Neville Longbottom. It was as if she was saying goodbye, resigned to both his fate and hers. After that day, people avoided Neville. It wasn’t as if he had ever been popular, but the rumours had spread, and the story told of the end of fifth year and the grave battle that he had fought and survived. People pointed him out in the corridors, nodded when he passed him, asked him for advice. Neville tolerated it with a growing unease, uncertain in his response, fumbling for words. He did his best to help and not to hinder, but the conversation would always stray to his bravery, his determination, the glory he didn’t seek but nonetheless had, and Neville would politely excuse himself and leave before he broke out in a cold, uncomfortable sweat.  
  
His housemates wanted to make him a hero; some others wanted to make him an enemy, and Neville felt like neither, so he shrugged and avoided and shut down until everyone passed by and left him alone, tucked within a cocoon of regret and futility. It felt better this way.  
  
It was good to be unwanted and dismissed again. There were no promises sought that he could not keep, especially his own.  
  
Now it is the sixth week of term, and Neville has taken to drifting through the corridors. Not the fifth, not the seventh, but the sixth. Enough time to get used to the pattern of school again, and enough time to realise it will not get any better: that this is all he is, and there is nothing more. Few of the prefects see him even when he’s out beyond curfew, and fewer still would bother to stop him; his red-rimmed, harsh gaze has grown more prominent of late, and he resembles some latter-day prophet.  
  
He used to think things would be different, this year. He thought they had to be.  
  
But that was then and this is now, and Neville Longbottom turns around some corridor far distant from Gryffindor Tower, almost walking into Draco Malfoy in the process. The Slytherin prefect is a haggard reminder of his old self; still sharp, still narrow, but reduced and worn as Neville is and wants to be. They stare at each other in a moment of stark shock, Malfoy all but rocking back on his heels, hand immediately clasping his wand like he perceives Neville to be a threat. Neville has never thought of himself as being a threat – amiable, yes, lame, certainly, roly-poly and non-threatening a given, but then he wasn’t the one turned into a slug at the end of last year. Draco Malfoy is a hollow man, and he knows it, and so does Neville, and Neville doesn’t care.  
  
“Well,” Draco sneers half a second too late, eyes tightening, wand raised, “what have we here?”  
  
Neville just blinks at him, and doesn’t bother responding. Malfoy isn’t worth the trouble, and he adjusts his footsteps to take him away, but Malfoy steps right into his path with a fluid grace that seems all the more in place because of his fear.  
  
“I’m not letting you get away with breaching curfew,” Malfoy tells him loftily. “I wouldn’t be a good prefect if I did now, would I?”  
  
Neville blinks again, and finds he actually wants to say something. It’s an odd sensation, and he has to lick his lips a few times and swallow; when he speaks his throat feels dry and rusty but it proves him true and carries him through. “You aren’t a good prefect,” he says, simply, the terrible blandness in his voice just emphasising his dismissal, and Malfoy blanches before pushing forward, wand hand shaking a little.  
  
“You take that back!” he cries, and Neville doesn’t care.  
  
“You’re not a good prefect,” he repeats, stepping forward.  
  
“I’m warning you,” says Malfoy, but Neville has had enough warnings in his life.  
  
“You’re petty, you’re nasty, you have no consideration for anyone but yourself and so no-one has any consideration for you,” he continues, one step after another, implacable, indefatigable, because he’s too tired and too empty and Malfoy might as well hex him into a coma; he’s come too far to be beaten. “You only succeed through fear and intimidation because nobody could ever like you.”  
  
“How dare you,” breathes Malfoy, but it’s an empty threat and they both know it. Hobbled by fear and caged by defeat, he swings his arm just a second too late; Neville’s wand is already there and Malfoy’s wrist comes down on it with a clatter and a yelp. Their eyes meet again, and Neville almost expects Draco to burst into tears. “How dare you.”  
  
“Go away,” Neville tells him, heart heavy, as he shuffles past him.  
  
He gets a few yards down the corridor before the quick sound of footfalls alerts him to the prospect of another attack, but Neville doesn’t bother to turn around. Sure enough, Malfoy is too petty and too angry to do anything well considered, and launches himself at Neville’s back with a yowl. He scratches, digs his knees in, pulls hair. Neville smartly tucks his wand back in his robes so he doesn’t have to worry about it and reverses right into the wall with a sickening crunch, feeling Malfoy slide to the ground behind him.  
  
When he turns around, Malfoy looks small, battered and insignificant, a trickle of blood flowing from a nostril that he absently pats at with an elegant cuff, leaving a smear of red on his upper lip that he flicks at with his tongue. “You helped them capture my father,” Draco tells him like he has some kind of power, like the threat implicit in his eyes, the hate, the anger, the utter loathing is something Neville is supposed to take seriously.  
  
“I did,” Neville acknowledges, and raises his hand, bending down to crouch further towards Draco. He doesn’t stop when Malfoy flinches, turning his face away.  
  
“Don’t hurt me,” he whines, terribly frightened, before the cold remnant of his rage resurfaces and he stares at Neville with cold eyes. “But then, I wouldn’t expect anything less from you Gryffindors.”  
  
“Stop it,” Neville tells him irritably. He holds Malfoy’s chin in place with a firm grip, and dabs delicately at the blood with a hanky. Malfoy reminds him of one the warier predatory plants he’s nursed in the greenhouses, something exotic and tentative and out of place. Malfoy is all silver and fey; not pretty, too precise to be pretty, every line on his face definite and cutting like a knife, graven with displeasure and fear and contempt. Neville’s amazed Draco’s stayed still for so long, let alone not dug a boot in while Neville was helping him, but then true to form, something ugly displaces all that paleness and Draco spits right in his face with a grunt.  
  
“Don’t touch me. You took my father away.” Then he turns his head back to face the wall, just as dismissive as Neville was of him. “I don’t need help from the likes of you.”  
  
Straightening with bones that seem to creak and age years with the passing of each second, Neville wipes his face with the blood-stained handkerchief and tucks it back up his cuff. He thinks about how he would have felt if someone had taken his parents away. He thinks about what it might have been like to get to know them.  
  
He doesn’t want to think about Malfoy and his parents; it makes him too human.  
  
“…Why do you carry a handkerchief around anyway?” Malfoy asks him in a quiet voice as Neville turns away. He stills in the process of lifting his foot to make that first difficult step away.  
  
“My Gran always taught me to clean up after myself,” Neville replies, just as calm and quiet and sad, because his Gran taught him to do that whether he needed it or not, and manages that step. The next is easier, and the one after easier still.  
  
“They executed my father because you caught him,” Malfoy calls as Neville walks off, ever quicker, ever faster, shoulders slumped and head bowed, because Neville’s found that Malfoy is at his most dazzling when he’s broken.  
  
That night, and each night after, he unfolds himself on the bed like a child’s toy, all stiff joints and laborious motion, and turns to look at the neatly folded handkerchief that rests on his bedside table. He doesn’t put it in the laundry for the house elves; he doesn’t want to.  
  
One week after meeting Draco in the corridor, the Ministry finally confiscates Malfoy Manor as the spoils of crime. When the Aurors and Wizengamot officials arrive to take legal custody of the demesne of the Ancient and Authorative House of Malfoy a day later, they find Narcissa Malfoy strung up by her neck in the formal study.  
  
It is the talk of the school; Draco stays in the Slytherin dorms for a week, does not attend classes, does not speak. Pansy Parkinson takes him food, and from her put upon moaning, Draco is not the easiest of victims to nurse.  
  
Neville stares at the white square of cloth on his dresser and dreams of his parents.  
  
*  
  
“You’re good at that,” Draco tells him, almost simpering, and bows his head when Neville glances over at him. It is the ninth week of school, and Malfoy has started paying him attention. It is known to many that Neville spends the occasional evening in the greenhouses potting and fertilising and just generally gardening to his heart’s content. Plants are, after all, what they are, and nothing more. Savage and noble, each according to its nature, and in this nature they are constant and predictable. They will grow if Neville helps, and sometimes not, no matter how hard he tries, but Neville pays them all the love and attention and care he can, working with steady hands and aching back until his hands cramp and shudder with fistfuls of soil and he can work no more. It’s a good, honest thing to be doing, and when things need pruning, Neville steels himself and cuts away the dead wood with the care of a lover in mourning.  
  
“Don’t be nice to me just because you want something,” he admonishes Draco carefully, and doesn’t need to look to see the way Draco glowers a little, lowering his gaze like it won’t be noticed, and brushes some stray hair from his forehead. He still looks emaciated, pinched, sickly; all thin wrists and skin too pale to be completely healthy, and his nightshirt hangs off him so he resembles a boy of ten more than sixteen, but he comes to the greenhouses whenever Neville is there – and, Neville thinks, sometimes when he is not.  
  
“I wanted to ask you about my father.”  
  
“You usually do.”  
  
“You were there. I didn’t get to see him.”  
  
It is the old conversation, one they have had and keep having and will probably have until the end of time. Draco picks at him steadily but not surely, occasionally rising into a sulk or rant or tantrum, or boring at Neville’s back with hollow eyes. Whether angry or sullen, he continues the interrogation, and Neville never gives him one bit of information; his hands keep packing soil at the base of the plant he’s working on, occasionally watering it from a small can, and Draco doesn’t leave.  
  
“I’ll do whatever you want me to,” Draco tells him, soft and unrepentant at the same time, as if blaming Neville that he’s come to this and too shy to admit what this is.  
  
Neville sets the can down gracelessly, and turns. This is different. He hasn’t felt anything different since the holidays. “Anything?” he asks, stretching the word out into each of its syllables.  
  
“Anything,” Draco nods, solemn and certain, curling in on himself. Neville reminds himself that Draco’s a cheat, a bully and a liar, and Neville shouldn’t trust him for a second. He turns back to his watering.  
  
“Please. He’s my father.” Draco looks like he’s going to snivel, shivering in the warm air of the greenhouse, and the moonlight that plays across his skin just emphasises the recent ravages of his life. He looks all the purer for it, refined into one human portrait of abject misery, and Neville thinks that this is the great spectre he and his have cowered from for years, that this is the seed of the family who ruined his – a pale, weak thing that can’t even articulate a word of thanks. A few weeks ago he would have found it pathetic; soon after, depressing. Now Draco is simply Draco; and he acts according to his nature and nothing more.  
  
“What are you looking at?” Draco demands to know, arching back and sitting straighter on the bench on which he’s found repose, and Neville has the decency to contain a snort.  
  
“You,” he breathes. Draco’s look of uncertainty brings a small sense of satisfaction. “Kiss me.” It’s not an unusual request; Neville has never been kissed yet, and he wants to – like all boys his age he is full of aching desire and an inability to express it. The most minor things will create visions in his head of full-breasted women and lean men; he can stare at the stone floor for hours and somehow still get an erection chafing against his underwear. Now he has the chance to do something about that, and it’s free and it’s easy, and it’s taking advantage, which feels more than a little wrong.  
  
Neville frowns to himself, tongue resting against his upper lip, and Draco seems to take the frown as a grimace, scurrying back a little in worry and fear. “I beg your pardon?” he squawks, but it’s mostly muted, and he stares at Neville with wide, grey eyes.  
  
“You said you’d do anything,” Neville reminds him. The words are heavy in his throat, but they’re true. Draco _did_ say that; this isn’t Neville’s fault.  
  
“I don’t even like _boys_ ,” scowls Draco, puffing up a little.  
  
Neville just looks at him until Draco blushes under the weight of the lie. “I’ve seen the way you look at Harry.”  
  
That scores a hit, a very palpable hit; Draco’s skin flushes further, his eyes widen and his mouth struggles to make words for a few long moments. The glow in Neville’s gut begins to grow; this is power, this is fear, and Draco is so very, very obvious in his vulnerabilities. “I…that was just a stupid boyhood crush,” admits Draco with a certain rueful rakishness, dragging those slender fingers through hair gone limp with abuse and lack of care, and tries to laugh it off. “I don’t like _him_ anymore.”  
  
“You don’t?”  
  
Draco gives a brittle little laugh as he plays with his hair again. “He’s not exactly the nicest person in the world,” he muses, leaning a little closer, confiding in him. “He’s never been able to even tolerate me.” There’s a pause, and Draco sweeps his lower lip with his tongue in a slow, careful drag, looking up at Neville from under dainty eyelashes. “Not like you do, Longbottom.” It’s sweet, Draco’s attempts to be coy; almost complimentary, and Neville finds he can ignore the clumsiness - he's clumsy enough himself, and in no position to judge.  
  
Their mouths meet clumsily somewhere between them; they bash their noses together gently at first, and Draco smiles a little at that, before Neville slides his thick, round fingers into that pale gossamer hair and guides their mouths together more properly. There’s a small exhalation of breath against his mouth that makes Neville want to giggle; he’s never done this before and neither has Draco probably, which makes him want to smile and cry at the same time. Draco is just a boy looking for a friend, and he doesn’t protest when Neville parts his lips gently with his tongue and slowly explores his mouth. Indeed, the Slytherin – the Malfoy – the son of the House of Black – seems to welcome it, curling an arm lazily around Neville’s waist to push up his shirt and drag delicate fingers over Neville’s belly. The exhalation of breath continues to tickle, turns into a whimper, a sigh, a gentle pleased ‘Mmm’ as Neville languidly strokes against his tongue, over his palate and his teeth. He smells as he looks; not sickly, but not well, hair full of shampoo and lemon and antiseptic as Neville breaks the kiss to bury his face in it, ruffling it gently. Draco mews underneath him. His skin tastes clean, almost metallic, with just a touch of lavender from soap and scrubbing, and when Neville finds his mouth again, he tastes as sharp as spring water and as nebulous as starshine. All the strength in the world is in this pale, pointed young man, who will break and break and break but not be bowed, and just to prove this, Neville yanks his head back with a certain savagery to mark Draco’s neck with teeth and tongue. “God, Longbottom,” Draco gasps out, clutching at him, whimpering, hauling Neville into his lap so they can rut against each other like animals and isn’t too long before all that dry humping causes Draco to moan and clutch and whimper and leave a wet spreading stain on the front of his trousers.  
  
Neville stops and looks at him with a terrible anger, hand still clutching in Draco’s hair, observing the rising marks on that creamy flesh, the evidence in his crotch. He doesn’t want to say it. He has to. He’s a Longbottom, and they’ve lost too much for too long. “Your father cried when they caught him and led him out,” he says, with a cold calm conviction that doesn’t stop when Draco begins to shudder in his arms. “He ranted and raved and foamed at the mouth like a rabid dog,” he continues, as compassionate as he can be under the circumstances.  
  
Draco buries his head in Neville’s neck and cries until he stops. When he looks up, he’s all puffy-eyed and stubborn, and Neville’s never seen a more beautiful sight. “They put him down like one.”  
  
There is a long pause, and it takes Draco time to even recognise how he’s come in his pants. “That wasn’t my first time, you know,” he says, quite prissily, and Neville absently runs fingers along thin hair. “I’ve been with _girls_.”  
  
“But you like boys,” Neville observes.  
  
“I don’t like you, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Draco shoots back. “I actually have taste.”  
  
“You came in your trousers, Draco,” Neville states, quite openly confused, because Draco is no idiot – and he’s not just a Malfoy anymore – but he’s certainly not making any kind of sense that Neville understands.  
  
“That happens when you do what we did,” Draco claims airily, and looks down at himself. “I should go and clean up.” He looks over at Neville with an odd kind of hunger, and Neville, ever patient, begins to put the pieces together. “I hope you’re not going to make me get you off,” he continues, toss of his head, lips pursed.  
  
Draco’s treating this whole thing like some kind of joke, and Neville doesn’t know whether he wants to smack him or hold him. There are some things which are still supposed to be sacred, and if Draco needs a lesson in the sort of good manners Neville has always been schooled in and never allowed to step over, he’ll get one.  
  
“I’m going to make you…you know,” Neville fumbles for the words, and can’t help but blush as he stands on unsteady legs, wiping sweaty palms on the coarse fabric of his jumper.  
  
“What?” Draco snaps, amused. “Kiss you again? Touch you up? Oh, the mighty and experienced Longbottom knows all the-”  
  
“Knees, Malfoy,” Neville cuts him off simply, and stands on unsteady legs, hands already at his belt. Draco glances up at him, and doesn’t leave when Neville undoes his belt with a clink.  
  
“I said knees,” Neville repeats, swallowing, because yes, this is power, and this is rage and this is fear and hurt and anger and exactly what he deserves. This is the boy who tormented him, and whose family stole his, and who laughed and bullied and – and – “ _Please_ , Draco.”  
  
“Don’t _hurt_ me,” Draco warns him, but submits, and doesn’t leave or protest when Neville threads his fingers that aren’t half as delicate or slender or capable as Draco’s into that head of hair, pushes down his slacks and boxers, and rubs the head of his cock against that sharp, displeased mouth to leave a glistening trail.  
  
The wet breath of Draco’s mouth against the tip of his dick only makes him shudder and want more – so much more, all the more he can get, because this is real and this is happening, and he slides it into that mouth and between those lips with a slick sound as Draco half-heartedly attempts to suck at the same time. It takes them a while; all inexperience and spit, but they find a movement with Neville’s jerky hips and Draco’s bobbing head, and Neville digs his fingers a little deeper into that hair and murmurs out a bunch of nonsense words, empty endearments, platitudes, telling Draco how good he is, how sweet, how wet and hot and ‘oh’, and he does feel glorious around him, so that’s no lie. It’s not quite perfect; they don’t quite mesh, and Draco uses his teeth accidentally once or twice and Neville yelps and pulls in his hair – which Draco actually seems to like, releasing long shaky moans around Neville’s cock, and finally Neville loses it and holds the back of his head in place as he fucks that face, fucks that proud mouth, reduces him to tears and blubber and choking, makes those thin lips pout and stretch and bruise, and finally proves that Draco Malfoy is actually useful for something other than causing pain.  
  
When he comes, he comes silently, grinding his teeth together rather than give Draco the satisfaction, and yet when he pulls out and kneels the hurt on Draco’s face is more than he can bear.  
  
“I didn’t hurt you, did I?” Neville asks, and finds he actually cares.  
  
“You didn’t,” Draco tells him, voice husky and throaty and thoroughly fucked, and it’s true: Malfoy is at his most powerful when he’s weak, when he’s just another victim to be broken a little bit more and bandaged up.  
  
“Tell me if your father was worth that,” Neville manages to say, and turns back to his planting. Draco looks at him a while before sniffling, adjusting his now dirty clothes and ragged hair, and pads off on uncertain feet. Neville counts the seconds until he’s out of earshot of the greenhouse, and is violently ill over the garden beds.  
  
He wonders if Bellatrix Lestrange felt like this, if all torturers feel like this, giddy and high and powerful and terrible, and pushes the thought away before he’s ill again. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen; Neville’s not sure if he was meant to care about Draco or not, but care he does, now.


	2. Part Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They never could forget their families.

Three weeks later, Draco sits himself down on a bench next to Neville one evening in that very same greenhouse. Neville glances over, keeps on working. Draco shuffles a bit. The silence strains, grows further, gets uncomfortable, and finally Draco breaks.  
  
“He wasn’t,” he admits, in a terribly alone voice. “But he was my father.” There is a mixture of loathing and love in that tone; a portrait of a man who refused to break, or bend or borrow, not even for his son, and Neville is reminded of a stiff woman who carts him off to St. Mungo’s and expects him to be grateful his parents are slack-jawed idiots when she can remember them and he cannot. They have both lost their families; they are both the good sons, the faithful sons, the pride and product of a generation, and both utterly swamped in being so.  
  
Neville just wants his parents back, but all he has is his grandmother. Draco hasn’t got anything except Neville, and possibly Pansy Parkinson.  
  
Neville tries not to think of how sad that is.  
  
Their second kiss is sweeter than the first; shy, gentle, joyous. Neville brushes the corner of Draco’s mouth, and rests his hands on his trousers. “I’m going to smell like peat,” Draco mutters ungraciously, and wriggles away a little, nose wrinkled.  
  
“Good,” Neville says, and kisses him again, cupping his chin like he did all those weeks ago. Draco stills and does not protest, his shock too great to do so.  
  
When the kiss is ended, Draco crosses his arms like a prince and utterly refuses to do anything more until Neville washes his hands. “I don’t even like you,” he tells Neville, jaw jutting and defiant. He pleads, whimpers, cajoles and does not lead; his defeats are too heavily graven into him for that, so he makes his objections known even if there is no force behind them. “So the least you can do is be a little cleaner.”  
  
*  
  
They do talk sometimes. About school, about friends, about houses and rivalry and families. They hardly touch on the War, on loyalty or on purity, for this will make Draco shout and bicker and get Neville to setting his shoulders and shutting up. They fight like this several times, a sea of stormy refusal and stony silence until one or the other broaches a safer, neutral topic, and all is right again. Sometimes they laugh, sometimes they snuggle or just relax. At times they bring their books and settle in the small hut adjacent to the greenhouses, candles glowing in the dim night as they work on papers, notes, schedules.  
  
They do not forget their families.  
  
One night Neville explains what happened with Luna; he explains what happened with Harry and Hermione and Ron and Seamus, spills out all his own secrets but no-one else’s, because they are not his to tell. Draco kisses him then, soft and tender and shy, before sliding down to pull Neville’s cock into his sucking, wanton, swollen mouth and smirk around it as Neville sits in his chair, hands pressed to his sides, sweat breaking out on every inch of skin, and finally comes down Draco’s throat with a low, open moan that was almost Draco’s name.  
  
It’s the first time Draco has managed to get him to say anything, and Neville – who has always tried to come quietly, never the best at silencing charms – blushes a little and endures Draco’s constant teasing and all-too-aware licking of his lips for the rest of the night. That is, until he can endure no more, and presses Draco up against the wall of the hut and kisses him with the same thorough vigour he brings to all his projects, and finds he likes the way he tastes in Draco’s mouth.  
  
It is an evening in May, and Draco closes his books with a quiet sigh, tucking them none too neatly in his satchel and looping that over his shoulder. Neville watches him go with a confused expression, tucks his own quill away in his pencilcase and snaps it shut. It’s barely ten, and they’re not finished, but there’s Draco, hanging on the threshold, door open, about to launch into the spring night.  
  
“He’s still my father,” he says, and goes before Neville even knows what to say.  
  
The following morning Neville wakes, and at breakfast learns that roughly a quarter of the student population has left in the night, all belongings taken. There are Slytherins gone, and Ravenclaws, Hufflepuffs and even Gryffindors, and everyone knows what it means. The times have been too quiet, the world too still; now war is upon them, and those loyal to the Dark Lord have fled to do their master’s bidding.  
  
Neville squares his shoulders and eats his porridge and feels annoyance more than anything; he was beginning to think the War would never happen. Summer was a wasteland; golden and quiet and calm. The school year started, and the pattern remained the same: the world was quiescent, at peace, and one boy could fall in love with another and not care about the consequences, for there were no consequences. The seasons stretched out to eternity, time stilled, and Neville could not do a damned thing.  
  
Classes are reorganised into blocks of duelling and hexing and shielding; charms and transfiguration and DADA all in one. Potions, Herbology, COMC: these become specialties restricted only to the best; Divination is a rumour and History of Magic is forgotten entirely. Neville works hard, does his best, and visits his parents when he can.  
  
In the dawn of the previous holidays, he had thought the news of his victory might bring them out, might rescue them. Like any child, he ran to tell his parents, beaming with pride, with the proof of his love. But his father read the paper and his mother emptied her rubbish into his hands with the mewling noises of an idiot, and he stood and grew stonier with each visit until he finally broke and yelled at them, demanding they come back, needing them, needing them always. He thought they would recover; he thought he could bring them back.  
  
He could not.  
  
His father didn’t stop, but his mother’s face ran with tears and she shrieked and hid in a corner and bashed at her head with open fists until the healers sedated her, and his grandmother surveyed it all and told him how proud they’d be of him. “Just you remember to get that bitch,” she told him gruffly as she led him away, head held high like she does actually have something to be proud of. “Get her and beat her and show her what for.”  
  
He wanted to kill his grandmother for that.  
  
Neville gets ready for war. He tries to be careful, he tries to be thorough, he tries to be cautious and steady and sure, because he is too used to failure now, and surprisingly, it stings. When the war comes, he faces it with a big heart and an outstretched wand. He throws himself into battles, into mania, defeat, victory, death. The names and faces and trenches and tortures fade one after another; he learns to accept what he is, and when he finds that Black bitch he gets her and bests her and doesn’t listen to her pleas for mercy.  
  
He doesn’t kill her, though. She ends up in St. Mungo’s, screaming. He visits her once, and is violently ill at what he is capable of, and his grandmother tells him how disappointed she is that he felt sorry for someone like that, how disappointed his parents would be if they knew. Neville forbears on telling her that his parents remain essentially useless, that they may always be useless, and doesn’t explain all the ways he has been trained to be a killer, because she is his grandmother and would never understand. It is after all, a great victory and Neville is a great hero, but now that the War is over, he settles down, moves out and becomes a member of the D.M.L.E. instead.  
  
A year passes. He doesn’t forget Draco. He can’t forget Draco. Draco is all the students who left Hogwarts for a worse cause and darker gods; Draco is all the people who died, all the people who left him, all the sons without parents; Draco is all the losses Neville has had to endure and cannot understand. Draco simply is, and in the cold air of the evening, Neville makes himself a cup of tea and speaks to the empty room.  
  
“I said I wouldn’t hurt you,” he says, but he couldn’t save him either.  
  
*  
  
Neville lives quietly. He raises a garden, vegetables mostly, nothing exotic, just something to supplement his diet and provide him with a good, honest hobby. He is sure, he is careful, he becomes renowned for never drinking too much and always making sure everyone can get home from office parties. He busies himself with post-War clean up efforts, reconstruction, legal reform, advocacy review, and if anyone questions why he goes through the files of convicted Death Eaters, he reminds the questioner that they too were fathers, daughters, mothers, sons, and all wars are crimes and all people deserve justice.  
  
It’s not the kind of attitude his grandmother would approve of, but then it also leads him to getting a reputation as a bit of a good but odd sort, which means people leave him alone.  
  
In the autumn, he finds one name mentioned in a file, one name not explicitly relevant to the case he’s working on, but when Neville asks the case manager she just shrugs it off as another symptom of his obtuse consideration, and mostly to get him off her back, hands over the Malfoy file.  
  
Neville finds that Draco is not cautious, nor careful. Draco is completely and utterly guilty, and has confessed to this in open and copious detail. His guilty plea and agreement to hand over information to the state – which has led to the discovery of all sorts of mass graves and underhanded Death Eater research projects and sources of finance – has caught the state in a kind of bind. They are the victors, and they wish to be known as magnanimous; yet in turning himself over and confessing, Draco has shown himself worthy of commiseration. Neville stays up into the small hours of the night for weeks on end, then returns home to pore over judgement, commentary, statement, affidavit, the pages and pages of documentation that leave Draco in a legal limbo.   
  
Neville shovels pasta into his mouth and continues to read. His garden starts to go to weed, sacrificed to the turning of pages and the gathering of information. Draco must be executed; Draco cannot be executed. And so he stays in a small safe house in Muggle London, constantly guarded, constantly watched, constantly humiliated. He cannot sleep, eat or shit without supervision; if the state cannot hang him without seeming petty, it will make sure he wishes he were dead, and by doing so attempt to ingrain his guilt into him for the rest of his natural life.  
  
Under the guise of a side enquiry to the case he is working on, Neville asks for permission to visit this prisoner of the state, this almighty menace to society. He fills in a request form, makes his case out in triplicate, and waits as the forms are queried, meetings are held, ancillary documentation sent down for him to explain himself. He goes through it all with the same stubborn surety that has always seen him through. He knows his reasons and his arguments and crosses every t and dots every i. He argues with his case manager, his immediate superior, the associate legal counsel, the minister’s legal counsel, the solicitor general, the minister of state for wizarding home affairs, and finally with the Minister herself. Amelia Bones steeples her hands, listens to his words, and grants his request with a faint frown. She tells him the law is no good unless it protects all its citizens, which means the sad fact of the matter is Draco Malfoy is to be given care and consideration by a government he attempted to vilify and destroy, and they must do this for they are better.  
  
Neville has his doubts about that. Neville thinks Draco is innocent of almost everything he confessed to. Not because he believes Draco is good or great or wonderful; he knows Draco all too well. The confession, however, is just a little too pat and a little too easy, and Neville needs some answers, so he goes to visit Draco.


	3. Part Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> To the victor went the spoiled.

The house is old and thin and narrow; something Edwardian or Victorian or Georgian; Neville can never remember the styles. Three stories, with windows on either side of the front door, mirrored on each successive floor. It is an impossibly constricted house, looking wedged in and squeezed between all the other impossibly narrow houses that dart the street in Southwark. A cast iron fence barricades the cellar entrance from the sidewalk, and Neville notices the cellar windows are barred and shuttered as he stands on the steps and knocks.  
  
The Auror who opens the door is a pleasant enough surprise; all square jawed blond hair Hufflepuff who Neville correctly places him a few years younger than himself. Owen, he thinks, Owen Cardall or Cordwell or something like that, and shows Owen the signed Ministerial order before placing it back in the buff folder he bought just for the occasion. They go down a flight of stairs, and Owen doesn’t even knock at the closed door, simply pushes it open and waits outside.  
  
Draco sits at the kitchen table nursing a cup of tea and biting his fingernails to the quick. He looks tired. Even the sight of Neville doesn’t shock him for too long; he just takes another swig of the tea. “Oh. It’s you,” he sneers, and it’s almost reassuring, that; if Draco Malfoy can still remember to swagger and fight, perhaps he’s not truly lost after all.  
  
Neville ignores Owen’s snort, and strides in, trying not to feel so dumpy and round and plain in comparison. Draco still isn’t pretty – and never was handsome – but he has a certain indefinable something that might simply be stubborn presence and towering, pig-headed pride, enough of it to fill up a room.  
  
“I’ve been given authority to interview you regarding certain matters,” Neville says, laying a few pieces of paper out on the table, working out exactly how to do this, and coming up with nothing.  
  
“I thought I’d confessed to everything,” Draco shrugs, cricking his neck. “But by all means, remind me of what a horrid bastard I am, and I’ll admit to that too. I killed a few kittens as a child, did you want to add that as well?”  
  
“Don’t be petty.”  
  
“Petty is all I have. Are you going to beat me? They do that a lot here.”  
  
Neville looks at him. True, there are the traces of fading bruises and scrapes on his face, but there’s no way of telling how they were received. “You don’t complain about mistreatment?”  
  
“Who would I complain to? I don’t exactly get visiting hours. I’m the nation’s most embarrassing prisoner, after all, and therefore the most secret.” He sips his tea like it’s some kind of sacrament, as if he stays true to all that’s British and wizarding and pureblood with that chipped ceramic mug in his hand.  
  
“Don’t believe him,” Owen mutters from outside. “Besides, any hurts he takes, he deserves, for what he did.”  
  
That is enough for Neville to swear under his breath, and close the kitchen door. Draco just looks at him, and it almost seems as if the visit has done him good; the prospect of a sparring match has restored some kind of vitality to his face, a desperate yearning for company. “They can still hear, you know,” he adds with a small smirk, and takes another sip. “They like to hear, I think.”  
  
Neville ignores the subtext for the moment, and peruses his papers. “During your first interview after the War you confessed to the torture of Justin Finch-Fletchley on the 8th of August, 1998. Is this correct?”  
  
“Yes,” says Draco, rolling his eyes. “I’m not sure of the date, but I never could stand the chap. Muggles, you know.”  
  
“Yet you later confessed to being involved in an intelligence ring which culminated on that very evening with a spying action in Aberdeen.”  
  
“So?” Draco queries, raising an eyebrow. “It was a very busy day.”  
  
“Another Death Eater later confessed to the torture of Finch-Fletchley, whereas you continually gave evasive answers as to the actual charms that were used.”  
  
“He was a minor party to it,” Draco tells him grandly, all those lives and loss and pain waved away as insignificant. “I gave the orders, it was all me.”  
  
“You couldn’t remember how you tortured him?”  
  
“My dear Longbottom, I simply told Cornfoot to make the bastard hurt. Cornfoot took care of the details. I watched and made sure Finch-Fletchley was in extreme pain.”  
  
Neville watches him, and makes a small note in the margins of a page. It is interesting to see the way Draco’s eyes flicker to the notation, eager to read what’s been said about him, and Neville doesn’t have to see to know it happens. “We’ll leave that alone for the moment,” he decides, and lifts that parchment from the folder to go through his next question.  
  
“On the 22nd of January, 1999, you claimed to have been involved in the use of Dementors in Muggle London…”  
  
And so it begins. Counter-argument, debate, parry, thrust, block, shield, debate, attack. Avoidance and observation and flat-out refusal, sarcasm and savagery. Draco mocks him repeatedly, throws tantrums, moves from the table, and keeps getting himself cups of tea. Neville refuses to budge, refuses to give up, and even when Owen knocks to tell him he’s been there for six hours and that’s the limit, he takes pride in the fact he’s sweating but not beaten.  
  
“I suppose you think you’re being clever!” Draco yells after him when Neville marches sharply through the door. Neville _knows_ he’s being clever, and sure and steady will win the race. It’s only a matter of time, after all.  
  
Every weekday for a week he visits Draco, and they drag over incident and claim, statement and denial; Neville’s denials more than Draco’s. For every half-truth he comes close to ferreting out, every too tall tale he glimpses, every rationale and justification and out-and-out lie he uncovers, Draco sits and sips his tea and smirks and claims that he did it all, he had to have done it all, he was a good little follower, a brilliant little toady, and the damn Ministry should be grateful someone’s actually willing to admit to all these nasty, shocking crimes.  
  
“I think you’re lying,” Neville finally says, getting it all out in the open, and Draco just leans forward over the battered Formica table, twinkle in his eye and sneer on his face.  
  
“You tell me why I’d agree to be locked up here, my wand broken, my life ruined, if I didn’t do all of it,” he asks Neville in a low, savage voice, and Neville remembers just how potent Draco can be when he has nothing left to lose. Still, that question stumps him, and in the end all his can do is close his folder and head back to the office. He doesn’t know why Draco wants to play victim, saviour and pariah, but it’s a role he seems to relish.  
  
There is a memo on his desk; the Minister of Magic wants to see him immediately, and Minister Bones looks tired and grumpy and rubs at the bridge of her nose with delicate hands, her bangles too loose around bony wrists. “What are you playing at, Neville?” she wonders with a certain tolerant understanding, and Neville remembers with a sudden awkwardness that Susan had sort of fancied him during the War.  
  
“I think he’s innocent, Ma’am,” he replies, honest as he can be. Minister Bones lets out a strained groan, and rests her face in her hands for a few minutes.  
  
“Just give me one more day with him,” Neville asks, and doesn’t consider what he might do if she says no. The Minister sighs from behind her hands, and finally raises her gaze to his, tired and powerful and knowing.  
  
“Alright,” she agrees, and pushes an extension of her order across the desk to him, after signing and dating it. “One more day. But then you leave him alone and we forget all about the late and lamentable tragedy of Draco Malfoy.”  
  
History is written by the victors; and when Neville sits down in that small, cramped kitchen for that final day, neither of them have anything left to lose except the truth.  
  
*  
  
“Firstly, I’d like to state something for the record,” Neville announces to the invisible recording charms as he sets his papers out, thorough as he always is. Draco merely raises an eyebrow, and grunts; he’s learned not to expect anything, not to trust or have faith or even dream, and Neville thinks a society that stops even the guilty from dreaming isn’t worth the victory won.  
  
“During sixth year I was involved in a relationship with the suspect,” he continues, quite proper and voice steady, and his hands aren’t even shaking.  
  
Draco stares at him, mouth gaping like it used to when Neville surprised him all those years ago (which aren’t that many years ago; they might feel old and careworn and faded with the weight of history upon them, but they’re still young in all but their own minds), and hisses at him like there’s some need for concealment. “They can hear you, you know.”  
  
“I know,” Neville tells him, and his hands do begin to shake just a bit. “I don’t care. In fact, I’d be willing to go on record to say your trial was a farce, that you wanted to be found guilty, and that you’re quite probably the love of my life.”  
  
“Only quite probably?” Draco straightens in his chair, and almost smiles. “I think I’m insulted.”  
  
“Get over the table and I’ll show you how much quite probably is,” Neville admonishes him, and it isn’t a game anymore, not when Draco sets down the tea and stands, looking at him like this is something out of a dream or a fantasy or a nightmare, and doesn’t flinch when Neville uncurls his belt from out of his loops and hefts it heavily in his hands. “See? I’m coercing you. Now be a good boy and bend over the table, Draco.”  
  
“They can see,” Draco whispers, eyes trained on Neville’s, but shrugs out of the beaten old bathrobe they’ve shoved him into, and bends over the table, clad only in a pair of white briefs. “They can _see_.”  
  
“I don’t care. You’re innocent. I love you,” Neville tells him, dragging the leather of the belt lightly along Draco’s spine as he walks around the table, and his cock is already hard, so hard, hard and aching and twitching at the way Draco sighs and braces himself against the edge of the table, and he restrains a sigh as he slides Draco’s ratty underwear down to reveal the pert curve of his arse, pale and smooth and hairless – the moment seems too precious for sound.  
  
Neville has become a collector of pornography over the years, because Neville is sure and careful and wants to get things right, which is how he knows to part Draco’s cheeks, sliding his tongue along the cleft and making Draco wriggle and squirm and laugh, shuddering against the table. That laughter only increases when the knocking starts at the kitchen door, loud and insistent and increasingly angry when Owen finds the door has been fixed in place with a charm. It’ll give way in time, but for the moment Neville delves deeper, spreads Draco wider and explores the pucker of flesh with the flat of his tongue. It tastes musky and sweaty and dirty, and admittedly isn’t the most enjoyable act in the history of the world, except for the way it makes Draco buck and get all breathy and moan against him, the sounds growing stronger and more insistent, until Draco is clinging onto the table with hooked hands and begging for more.  
  
Neville gives him more, pressing open mouthed kisses to his entrance, thinking of all the names both vulgar and clinical for what he’s doing and what he’s doing it to, licking, suckling, slurping, fucking, diving into that wet, dirty heat and making Draco want it. One hand climbs up the vertebrae of Draco’s spine as Neville pulls out, flushed and sweaty and oh so hard, fingers tangling into sweat-damp hair and holding Draco down as he thrusts into him with one – sure, steady, slow – motion that makes Draco shudder and Neville gasp because he feel so tight and so comfortable and so, so right. This is what he’s dreamed of since sixth year, beyond loss and betrayal and war and crime and sin and victory. This counts more than any of those, counts more than good and just and ethic and punishment; this is true, this is proper, this is love, and Neville sets a jerky but slow pace, slapping balls against that arse, burying himself to the hilt and back and thrust and in and the door bursts open and several Aurors storm in, wands raised.  
  
“Can’t you see I’m being fucked by my boyfriend!” Draco cries out, and sounds like he’s enjoying it. “Sod off!”  
  
Neville pushes his head down gently, and merely looks at them. They go away, and close the door behind them. There is a sudden, shocking pause, and they both burst into loud, bountiful, freeing laughter, Neville losing his rhythm for a few seconds before he gets back into pace.  
  
“Not fucking,” he grinds out, speeding up because he feels close. “Making love.”  
  
“Oh, god, Longbottom, don’t get sappy on me,” Draco breathes out, and seems even more pleased. “Why…did you bother with me anyway?” he adds, before he comes, spurting in several shots against the table, and tightens even more around Neville’s cock.  
  
“Someone had to believe in you,” Neville manages to say, and comes deep inside him with a shuddering cry, hands hard enough on Draco’s hips to leave bruises. He sags against him then, sweaty and sated and thoroughly in love, and they take a long time just to breathe.  
  
Outside is the world, outside is loss and victory and the steady march of history, but in that small ratty kitchen is just them, the air slick with the smell of come and sweat, a place for them and only for them. Neville doesn’t want to leave, doesn’t want to move; he feels boneless and happy, even though all his questions haven’t been answered and probably can’t be. That is the way of the world; the weight of the world, and he pulls himself from Draco with a sucking sound that makes him wrinkle his nose a little.  
  
His studies in pornography have schooled him well, and so he sinks on aching knees back down to delve into Draco with his tongue, and taste himself there, bitter and dirty and tart, slurping and swallowing before he stands, pulling his trousers back up and doing his belt back up. Draco peels himself off the Formica – which he’s all but stuck to, thanks to the perspiration on his skin, and runs fingers through hair that’s definitely seen better days now. Still, he leans against the table like he gets fucked there on every known occasion, not thrown or rumpled or unsettled, and arches his neck and shoulders, getting out the kinks as he watches Neville dress with an amused gaze.  
  
“I’m coming back, you know,” Neville promises, and Draco nods before he makes himself another cup of tea, stark naked and not caring.  
  
“I doubt they could stop you, quite frankly.”  
  
Neville adjusts his clothes, and lets Draco comb fingers through his own hair before he grabs that wrist and caresses it with his thumb before replacing thumb with lips and feeling Draco’s pulse flutter underneath. “…I think you did it because he was your father,” he says softly, and Draco stiffens, takes his hand away.  
  
He’s massaging that wrist when Neville glances up at him, almost courtly, and Draco inclines his head in a magnanimous nod, prince to servant, and smiles with his eyes. “You might think that, Longbottom, but I couldn’t possibly comment.”  
  
Neville lets that go, because there will be plenty of time for answers later, not that any of them matter any more. He strides out of the house like a man reborn, and when Owen challenges him on the stairwell, Neville lets the young man tell him the Minister demands to see him now before admonishing him with the square set of his shoulders and an open expression. “If you hurt him, I’ll make what I did to Bellatrix Lestrange seem pleasant compared to what I do to you.” Neville knows his voice shakes a little, stutters, but his heart is in it, and that shows in his gaze. Owen mutters some kind of assurance, and gets the hell out of his way.  
  
The Minister is waiting in her office, scrawling away at even more forms. They won the world, and this is the prize: a better filing system. “I’m removing the guards at the safehouse and appointing you in their place, indefinitely. In return, you will agree to drop all investigations regarding Malfoy’s potential innocence, continue to be paid, and live out your lives in relative tranquillity and quiet.”  
  
Neville wants to ask her why; but then, he’s being paid for his silence, so silence is what he’ll give.  
  
She glances up at him, finally, furtive and alert. “He did kill a lot of people, Longbottom. Perhaps in ten years we can pardon him for good behaviour, but for the moment all the world cares about is that we got one and punished one and made him pay. Don’t ask for him to get a new wand, either.”  
  
Neville nods and takes the form, tucking it away in his robes. He walks sharply out of the room without feeling guilty about a thing. He returns to his desk, cleans it out, packs up his belongings, and gets them delivered to the safehouse. He apparates to his small flat, packs suitcases, leaves an owl to his grandmother which leaves open more than it explains, and attempts to make him sound like he’s undertaking some mysterious, brave and risky assignment coping with threats to national security, and hopes in that he can be the grandson she wanted, whether it’s true or not.  
  
He takes his suitcases over, leaves them on the landing, and watches the Aurors begin to gather their odds and ends before he makes one final trip.  
  
St. Mungo’s is busy as it always is, morning or night or afternoon, because people will always be sick and people will always be stupid. They know him here, they smile at him and ask him how he is, and Neville fobs them off with answers that are both vague and true, and feels good he can manage that. He walks down the corridors with the sure knowledge of his destination, and doesn’t feel his skin creep with reluctance. His mother and father are what they always are, and he loves them, and can do nothing more.  
  
He hugs them, holds them, rambles on about the man he loves, which seems to get his mother excited and chattering and opening up a trove of lolly wrappers and drink cans she has been collecting under the end of her bedsheets, which Neville takes with proper deference. He tells them he’ll be happy; he tells them he’ll visit. It’s not perfect, it’s not certain, but he’s grown beyond the need to prove himself. History is written by the victors, and Neville has surely won.  
  
At the end of one corridor, he stops in to a small padded room where a woman wastes away tied to her bed. Neville smooths away the limp long black hair that gathers over her brow, ignores her silent snarl, her writhing, and waits with her until she settles for a time. Her face is narrow, sharp; she will not be pretty, never be pretty, and Neville knows who else suits that particular description. Lucius Malfoy was Draco’s father; this is his aunt. Neville tells her he’s sorry for what he did, finds it’s true in the telling. He tells her he loves him and doesn’t know why it needed to be told, and leaves without a backward glance.  
  
That night he is unpacked and settled, allowing Draco up beyond the cellar and keeping him under observation. Not that Draco has anywhere else to go, but Neville did agree and he wants to keep his word. The Aurors have moved out, and so they have the run of the house to themselves; Neville spends the evening sorting out all the functions of the kitchen, what a fridge is, and other such delights, before he finds a series of handwritten notes Owen left on how to use the Muggle devices that litter his new home.  
  
He thanks Merlin for sensible, practical Hufflepuffs and manages not to burn the roast.  
  
They share the dishes, and Draco hits him with a wet towel, before splashing at him and being chased around the kitchen. Neville finds he likes doing the chasing, and Draco certainly likes being chased – and pinned, and kissed until he moans, and it’s sure and certain and domestic and safe. Outside is the world, and here is where they are.  
  
The battered sofa is able to take their weight despite ominously creaky springs, and Draco makes a good cup of tea. He claims it’s all the practice he’s had, and stretches out in front of the couch, head resting in Neville’s lap as they enjoy the opportunity just to be themselves.  
  
“You only got it half-right,” Draco tells him sometime after dinner, but before midnight, and gazes up at the ceiling. The TV flickers a ghost shadow on their faces; something mundane on BBC1 is on, not that either of them are listening. But it helps fill the space, and Draco won’t admit it, but he is rather partial to Monarch of the Glen.  
  
“Oh?” enquires Neville, and takes a sip of the tea, enjoying how it warms his stomach, makes him think of hearth and home and comfort, and other things he’s going to associate with Draco in the future.  
  
“There was a raid I led during the War,” Draco begins, musing aloud, worrying at his lips, and it’s rare to see Draco hesitant in speaking. “A simple slash and run attack on an Order-loyal building. Mostly intelligence and political operatives; information and propaganda. All civilians, except for some token defence staff, and most of those were wet behind the ears.”  
  
“Mmm,” Neville remarks, knowing Draco will tell him when he’s ready, and settles a hand against Draco’s hair. “That doesn’t seem fair.”  
  
“It wasn’t – that was the whole point. We went in and reduced the building to kindling and rubble. You have to remember, we weren’t worried about the Aurors, or the DMLE; we could beat you in terms of weaponry because we had no scruples, no fear, no favour. What we feared was losing the war of words, and your people were shamefully good at making us sound like empty bigots. So we went after your spies, your intelligence operatives, your speechwriters.” Draco’s voice grows wistful, lost in memory, in time, and loses some of its usual snarl. “I was left to do clean up. It was my responsibility to make sure everyone was nicely dead, and you lot knew who did it and why.”  
  
“I remember the reports,” Neville comments absently, sipping his tea.  
  
“There was one survivor. One in a building with about fifty people. He was pinned by some timber, but not crushed. He would have lived, was going to live. But then I found him.”  
  
Neville couldn’t help himself. “Who was it?” he asks quietly, cupping Draco’s forehead with a hand, stroking his thumb over the widow’s peak, because he’s still here and this is all the victory he needs, all the history he has left.  
  
“Entwhistle,” Draco tells him simply, and shrugging, rolling his shoulderblades against Neville’s legs. “He saw me there, holding my wand at his head, and he asked to live. ‘Please’, he said. ‘Please.’ It sounded so empty, so desperate, so full of need. ‘I have to live,’ he told me, ‘Seamus needs me.’”  
  
Draco picks up his mug from the floor, and takes a slow slurp of the milky tea, before settling it down again. “Of course, I killed him.”  
  
Neville closes his eyes and thinks of the boy who kissed him so languidly on the floor of the greenhouses, who was bright and eager and proud and potent, and who turned into this man.  
  
“I knew Entwhistle. I knew Finnigan. I remember seeing them flirt in sixth year, and then I wondered what would happen if you’d asked to be saved.” His voice sounds so horribly alone, but he makes himself keep going, even though he doesn’t have to – Neville would assure him of that. “You weren’t just the enemy anymore.” Draco takes a long, shuddering breath, on the edges of tears, and manages not to sob. “My father would have been so disappointed.”  
  
“It’s alright,” Neville tells him, and leans right over to meet Draco’s gaze as Draco tips his head back. “It’s alright.”  
  
“It’s not,” Draco sniffles.  
  
“It will be,” promises Neville, and Draco’s face clears after a few moments. They will write their own history from now on, and all the should haves and could haves and would haves will become true, and solid fact, and provide them with all the answers they require. Neville knows he’s not brave, and hardly a hero – he leaves saving the world to Harry. History may remember him as coward or traitor, but here is his victory, here is his quest, alive and in love, sprawled across his lap with tears in his eyes and the courage to be honest in his heart. One life is worth the price, and Draco burns with the force of his convictions; he is pure and potent and proud, and evermore that same boy who glistened under the night sky.  
  
This is the wonder of the world, he thinks.  
  
*  
  
In the evenings, Neville still finds that Draco’s kiss tastes like adamant and starlight.


End file.
